Overwhelmed at Underworld.

Sometimes a film just looks right.

If angels were to become flesh and fought over God’s plan here once more on Earth, then they would, I’m sure, look much like those in The Prophecy. If a defeated supercomputer sent a cyborg into the past to kill its nemesis’ mother, then The Terminator is how it would appear.

Underworld looks right.

From the opening moments as the vampire warrior Selene perches in her bell-tower eyrie above a nameless, rain-swept Eastern European city, you know that the atmosphere’s going to fit. The team of vampire assassins which she leads stalks a pair of lycans: the enemy werewolves which Selene and the Death Dealers have made nearly extinct in a centuries-long war. The team’s photo reconnaissance specialist leaps down to ground level first, to move as unseen by the human crowds as the human-shaped lycans themselves do. He merely tumbles off-screen, but when Selene does it, the camera shows the first of many elegant stunts in this thrilling and extremely stylish film.

The vampires track the preoccupied lycans into an underground station with its milling humans whose commute is shattered when the lycans notice their hunters and the first gunfight of the film begins. The film’s fight scenes are fast, exciting, varied and gripping. Because neither the vampire nor the werewolf sides are truly ‘good’, you don’t know how each one will end. The post-Matrix slow-motion, stunts and visible bullets are well done (Underworld’s weapons technology is excellent and convincing), and look as if they hurt. No-one dies easily in this war, and as a young doctor (the fleeing lycans’ intended prey) seeks to save the life of a bystander, werewolves scatter into the tunnels to escape. Selene after a wounded lycan, and soon encounters an underground den where, by the sounds echoing from it, her enemies are far more numerous than she had thought.

Back at the iron-gated vampire mansion, Selene tries to convince the leadership that the lycan threat is very much alive and thriving, but the coven’s master vampires are absent: each sleeping to await his own turn of a century’s rule. Soon, a delegation of the other great coven will arrive and its ancient Master, Amelia, will revive her contemporary Marcus to replace the administrator Kraven of his stewardship of the continent’s vampire nation. The cautious Kraven does not believe that the lycans pose a threat, and won’t let Selene lead a Death Dealer team into the tunnels.

[Stylistically, the mansion and its inhabitants are goth heaven. Trust me. If you were going to attend the Vampire’s Ball, this is what you’d strive for. If dressing up to look all svelte and undead is part of the fun of the whole vampire thing for humans, then Len Wiseman and his design people have piled the style on beautifully here.]

Unaware of the glories around her and unmoved by Kraven’s advances, Selene examines the reconnaissance photos and soon makes the connection between her enemies and the doctor she had briefly seen tending to the shooting victim. She just won’t let it go and, against orders, seeks out the doctor; Michael Corvin.

Poor man. He embodies the hopes of the lycan conspirators; carrying as he does a treasure in his blood which the lycans hope will turn the war in their favour and perhaps even end it. An ancient enemy of the vampire coven arrives to take Corvin (or at least a sample) back to the underworld, but in the second fight of the film Selene manages to escape from the wolfman-shaped attackers with a bewildered and bitten Michael.

It’s a fabulous fight, like all the others in the film. Werewolves become briefly immune to gravity once they get their speed up and Selene just never seems to choose the stairs to get to ground level. The film’s worth the ticket or the price of the DVD just to see her getting to the lobby.

Corvin saves her from drowning (running water?) in the city’s harbour, and she takes the increasingly feverish and hallucination Michael back to the mansion.

The secret is out now in that the outgoing vampire administration soon knows that Corvin has been wolf-bitten and will soon turn. As Kraven pursues his power games, Selene decides to break with precedent to awake her erstwhile mentor and sire, Viktor.

I don’t like spoilers in film reviews. Suffice to say that there are enough secret agendas and plots here to keep Selene and the gradually metamorphosing Michael on the run and unbalanced enough to avoid joining forces effectively against their various antagonists. The Selene turns it around and takes back the initiative. She brings evidence to the vampire rulers that their nations are gravely imperilled and so the grand finale arrives; a no-holds barred gunfight and gore fest between vampires and lycans, during which a network of conspiracies; ancient and modern, tests the sympathies, loyalties and allegiances of the heroes to the limit.

This has got to be in the top three vampire films of the modern cinema. It’s non-stop action and drama storytelling set against a rich, convincing, and beautiful world of slinky undead vampire seductresses and muscle-bound lycan supermen. The characters are larger-than-life in just such a way as those in Blade are, but they show more complexity and deeper emotions than the comic-book dhampir and his megalomaniac adversaries. I finished the film wishing Michael Corvin and the survivors well - if only so that they could duke it out in the inevitable sequels…

But my; the film looks great. Just great. It’s just the way it should be.

And there is nothing - but nothing in the whole wide world - to complain about about the sight of Kate Beckinsale in knee-length patent combat boots, rubber catsuit and leather corset blasting away at the lycan hordes.

Drink deep, my brothers and sisters. AB-

The Wiki entry contains massive spoiler information. But if you absolutely insist on having the surprise ruined, here it is.